making apps, making webs.

Podcast - "A multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, etc." If you have a modern phone, ipod, or mp3 player you can play podcasts on the move.  Or you can listen to them on your computer when you're not mobile.  It may seem a bit weird explaining what a podcast is... but there are many people who do not know what they are, or haven't tried them.  Skip to the bottom for lists of German podcasts . Situations where you may be able to learn with a podcast: sitting at the computer doing an office job (if you don't need to talk lots!) on a bus/train, or walking/running (be careful!) Other methods of learning may not be possible in these situations.  For example, you probably can't have a teacher follow you around the park as you go jogging.  Also, they probably can't sit next to you at your office whilst you work. It's always better if you can talk out loud along with the podcas...

Taking a byte of bits of Serial, along with Green screen with Sam, pygame, and an Arduino hooked up to a light sensor and a motor thing. Coffee too?  Naturally. Where do we begin?  At the end of course.  A video of the result... The arduino code #include < Servo .h> Servo myservo; int potpin = 0; int val; void setup () {    Serial . begin (9600);   myservo. attach (9); }    void loop () {   val =  analogRead (potpin);    Serial . println (val);   val =  map (val, 62, 540, 0, 179);   myservo. write (val);    delay (15); } python pygame code Extended the " green eggs and ham" code I made recently to read serial data from the Arduino, and paint the screen different shades of green, whilst also making some silly sounds depending on the value read from the light sensor. import os import pygame import serial # guessing serial ports nam...

Touchless UI?  This is the next step in my little adventure into the world of Arduino... It can sense light, from which the Ardunio reads an analog signal and then drives a Servo Mototor.

Moving a servo motor(vrmmm vrommm) based on the analog input Linearly interpolated (LERP'd) from the Potentiometer (turny thing).

So the Arduino adventure continues... This time, playing around with fading a light via an Analog output.

Coffee good.  Different styles of coffee good.  Viet coffee good. Try and get the viet bean, and get it ground the way they do it too.  It's usually a mild flavour... but with the sweetened condensed milk it can be very sweet.  Plus you can make it on your desk!  Mostly I don't drink it sweetened, but that's the way they mostly do it, so for this video I did that too :) Here is a much better video on how to make Vietnamese style coffee... great song too!

Picked up a small 360 lumen LED light with built in heatsink. As well as a multimeter.  Going to use them in a projector project with the Arduino. LED lights with built in heatsink, and a multimeter.

I am Sam.  Sam I am*.  Well at least my middle name is Sam.  So of course, one fun book I've always been drawn to is  Green Eggs and Ham. The famous beginners book by " Dr. Seuss ".   It contains just 50 different words: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you. A great beginners book, because it's a full story teaching a number of other concepts using a limited amount of words.  It's a clever bootstrapping hack to language learning.  Apart from all its cleverness, it's a fun & entertaining read too! :) So you want to teach some newbies how to be l33t python pygame pr0grAmm3rs?  Maybe Sam I am, and Green Eggs and Ham have something to teach us, the teachers? Let's reduce the number of concepts! Classes...

The Arduino adventure took a little pause today... I finally managed to buy a raspberry pi. Things have improved greatly with the software since I messed around with an alpha board 1 year and 7 months ago.  Pygame is even on the desktop!  Pretty cool :)  I just wish they'd been in contact with the project so we could have made the experience better.  Tried to reach out a few times with no luck.   But anyway... managed to get one finally.  * happy dance *   raspberry pygame Improvements to the sound, OpenGL ES, camera, movie, python 3 version, are amongst  some of the things I see that can be improved so far.

In this part of the little Arduino adventure, I've been messing around with the Fritzing prototyping application.  This lets you design things based on bread board layouts, then to generate Schematics and PCB. Unfortunately I couldn't get the schematic to draw properly.  Some connections are missing or wrong.  But that's ok, I'm not using it for anything serious :) Behold some pretty screenshots! Schematic... slightly wrong. Bread board diagram made in Fritzing.

The little Arduino makes the lights go on and off.  Simply amazing ;)

Read a bunch of this book this morning whilst I lay in bed drinking coffee and laughing. Really enjoying the blend of wine critic style with the struggling writer buddy road trip genres. Was even reading it on the train on the way home... so engrossed I missed my stop! I give it 7 stars. Out of 5.

Roughly sanded, and now coated twice with grey. What remains is masking tape to get straight strong lines where the grey meets the pink.

*Onion diced along with three bits of garlic smalled. *In a pot with olive oil Browning. *Then brown red capsicum (paprika) with about a cup of mushrooms(chunkily chopped). *Fresh parsley and basil chopped up with a knife. *Tomatoes 2 cups. *White beans, cup of. *Pesto, basil spoon of. *Diluted half teaspoon of veggie stock in cup of water, add to pot. *half hour later chop more flat leaf parsley. *Serve in a bowl each with a spoon of sour cream.

Been messing around with some colour swatches for the neu pygame website... colors/colours for pygame logo

Working on an Arduino(micro controllers) project with a friend.  Have to start somewhere... and that somewhere is programming the famous Blinking Lights !

I made a Tape Wallet